You would think that a comedy with four Oscar-nominated or Oscar-winning actors would have a high enough profile to make it into theaters, and yet The Maiden Heist, starring Christopher Walken, Morgan Freeman, William H. Macy and Marcia Gay Harden went straight to DVD. To be sure, there were specific business problems challenging its distributor, the Yari Film Group, but The Maiden Heist also faced the problems of the modern movie business in general, where studios seem averse to releasing any entertaining film that doesn't feature an immediately marketable hook like talking robots, talking animals or talking robot animals. If The Maiden Heist's cast were in a grim, grueling drama, that movie would probably make it into theaters for Oscar time, since they're in a light, bright and breezy caper comedy, and have an average age well above the industry's target demographic, someone somewhere calculated the cost of a release to theaters against the potential profits and made the call to put it on the silver disc of DVD as opposed to the silver screen of the theater.

And I'm not going to say that The Maiden Heist would have made buckets of cash if it played theaters, or rail against the way themovie business seems to be running these days, but I will say that The Maiden Heist works remarkably well on DVD, where it playsslick and slight and funny. Walken plays a security guard at a

Boston museum, who loses himself for hours in one of the gallery's classic 19th-century paintings, a portrait of a lady by the sea. One day, though, he's told that to make room for more modern pieces, the painting of the maiden is bound for Copenhagen. This, to Walken is unacceptable, it turns out it's also unacceptable to Morgan Freeman's guard, an amateur artist who's fascinated by a painting full of cats, and William H. Macy, who's grown a little too attached to a bronze nude statue that's bound for Denmark as well.

Director Peter Hewitt - who's given us suchunimpressive films as Zoom: Academy forSuperheroes and Garfield - makes one verysmart decision with The Maiden Heist, which isa simple and easy call: He gets out of the way ofhis stars. Walken has a wiggy-but-warm mix ofintensity and sympathy here that mixes his weirderperformances with his cheerier ones. Freemanuses his velvet purr of a voice to maximum effect,Macy's wiry, nervy statuary enthusiast ex-Marinehas a nice frantic charm. And as the threesomedecide that, well, they're just going to steal theart and replace it with duplicates so they canappreciate the pieces they love at a closer distancethan that between Boston and Copenhagen. And,really, who better to rob the museum than the mencharged with preventing that? Along the way,Walken also realizes that his relationship with hiswife, Harden, is different - and better - thanhe thinks it is, one passion renewing another.

The Maiden Heist isn't a top-ten heist comedy, and it's barely drop compared to the con capers of the Ocean's films, but it does have four professionals doing what they do remarkably well in a fun, smoothly-made bit of entertainment. Shot in Boston it was enjoyable to see familiar buildings and landmarks. Yes, The Maiden Heist had trouble making it to movie theaters, but that says more about a distributor and the new landscape of distribution than it does about the movie itself, the light laughs and a smattering of suspense in The Maiden Heist may be delivered on DVD, but they still deliver.